The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae
“It seems to the soul in this night that it is being carried out of itself by afflictions . . . This night is a painful disturbance involving many fears, imaginings, and struggles within a man. Due to the apprehension and feeling of his miseries, he suspects that he is lost and that his blessings are gone forever.” (St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night, Ch. 9, 5, 7)
In his new book, Secular Sabotage (FaithWords, 2009), Catholic League President Bill Donohue wrote masterfully of the front lines of the culture war between the sacred and the secular. More than at any other time of the year, these two forces face off in the Christmas season in a culture seemingly at war with its own soul.
When I was a younger priest, the period from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day always felt like a mixed blessing. The demands on a parish priest at Christmas are very great. A spiritual observance of Advent and Christmas is an exhausting challenge against an ever advancing tide of secular materialism.
We priests experience in the Christmas season both the hope of the Incarnation and the limits of our human condition. It’s a spiritually vulnerable time that can heighten the intensity of loneliness, the pain of personal struggles and alienation, the agony of loss. Christmas can bring with it a deeply felt awareness of suffering and shadow, of spiritual and emotional vulnerability. It’s a time when, for some, the spring of hope can feel a lot more like the winter of despair.
When I was asked to write for Priests in Crisis at Christmas, I felt very limited in scope. I was about to mark my sixteenth Christmas in prison. Frankly, Christmas in here is simply not what it is out there. It’s a time when the people around me suffer a great deal. Those with families and children are separated from them by impenetrable prison walls. Those who are alone have their loneliness magnified by the onslaught of Christmas imagery.
I set out to write something warm and fuzzy for other priests at Christmas, but, well, it just wasn’t coming. I kept being drawn to some unfinished business, something that has gnawed at me for seven years. Justice requires that I try to make some spiritual sense of it. Now is the time. What I am about to write may be very painful for some to read. Whether you are a lay Catholic, or a priest, deacon, or religious, if you are reading this, I beg you to read carefully and understand.
Seven years ago today, on December 29, 2002, a brother priest in my diocese took his own life. Father Richard Lower was 57 years old. He was a popular and very gifted – and giving – priest and human being. Father Lower had served Our Lady of Fatima Parish in New London, New Hampshire for the previous thirteen years, and he was much beloved by his parish family.
There was a lot that happened in Father Lower’s personal life over the preceding year. He had undergone his sixth painful back surgery. Then he developed septicemia for which he was hospitalized again. Father Lower’s mother died that November. These factors, and likely others that are unknown, left Father Lower physically, emotionally, and spiritually bereft to face the newest terror that was to enter his life two days after Christmas seven years ago.
NO CRUELER TYRANNIES
On December 27th, every priest’s worst modern nightmare was visited upon Father Richard Lower. He was informed by a diocesan official that a claim of sexual abuse had been lodged against him from thirty years earlier in 1972. Father Lower had never been previously accused. The accusation stood alone, but was enough – three decades later – to abruptly end a life of ministry and priestly self-giving.
Based on the single, uncorroborated thirty-year-old claim, Father Lower was informed that the police would be notified. In accordance with the “zero tolerance” policy of the U.S. Bishops’ new Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, he was suspended from ministry and told that he must immediately vacate the parish he had served for thirteen years.
As was every priest in the Diocese of Manchester, Father Lower was also painfully aware of an announcement from his bishop and diocese made just weeks earlier. In an unprecedented agreement between the Diocese and the State announced in December, 2002, the files and details of every accusation against any priest – regardless from however long ago – would be included in a vast public release of documents in March of 2003. Any privacy rights of the individual priests under canon or civil law were summarily discarded and waived by the signing of this agreement.
Two days after celebrating Christ’s birth with the parish community he loved and served for thirteen years, Father Richard Lower lived Christ’s scourging, and was about to live the Scandal of the Cross in a way for which he had no defense. Succumbing to the darkest night of his soul, this good priest, walking alone in the valley of darkness, took his own life.
Father Lower died without having either acknowledged or denied the 30-year-old claim brought against him. He died alone, apparently having reached out to no one. He left no note. A lot of people – including a number of priests – lamented that they could only imagine what Father Lower went through in those three days after Christmas.
I did not have to imagine anything. I knew exactly what he went through: the feeling of living in a vacuum, the sense of isolation, the feeling of powerlessness, the utter despair of never, ever being able to erase the scarlet letter indelibly marking the accused – guilty and innocent alike; the sheer impossibility of any defense after the passage of three decades; the overwhelming despair of exactly what Saint John of the Cross described in his Dark Night of the Soul:
“Due to the apprehension and feeling of his miseries, he suspects that he is lost and that his blessings are gone forever.”
Do you know what you were doing on any given day in 1972? Can you document your answer? If you’re a Catholic priest, you may have to, and your very life may depend on it. Innocent or guilty, what Father Richard Lower faced in those days after Christmas seven years ago is a hopelessness unlike anything one could imagine without going through it. It was for good reason that Dorothy Rabinowitz entitled her 2005 book about the power of false sex abuse claims, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times.
In my prison cell a few days after Christmas in 2002, my eyes closed when I read the headline story. I knew Father Richard Lower. He was a priest I admired, and one of only three priests of my Diocese who ever wrote to me in prison.
Nine months before he was accused, Father Lower wrote to another friend lamenting the terror being visited upon other priests. When so many others looked away in silence, Father Lower wrote courageously to challenge the lack of due process and presumption of guilt when other priests were accused. From an April, 2002 letter of Father Lower to a friend:
“The minute a man is accused, he’s immediately suspended. He is forced to
leave his rectory within the hour. The result of this horrendous policy is that
the priest is seen to be guilty until proven innocent.”
With reference to his back surgery and other pressures, Father Lower reacted to the media attack that had so consumed the priesthood that year. In the same letter, he wrote:
“With all the bad press the Church has received lately, it is very difficult
to either work as a priest in public or even to recuperate as a priest …
As Always, the press has had a heyday with this topic and reported
things whether true or untrue. Because the Church did not handle
it properly in the past, they now have a policy of no tolerance …
Another fallout to the scandal is that a ‘witch hunt’ has begun.
It feels like all priests are suspects and no one can be trusted.
Please pray for us.”
After Father Lower’s tragic death, an official of the Diocese of Manchester acknowledged the truth of exactly what Father Lower-feared, but also defended the policy. In a local news article, Father Edward Arsenault was quoted thusly:
“In parish communities where priests have been put on leave,
parishioners already believe them guilty. I know there is some expense.
But I am confident that our policy is fair.”
TREASURE AND TRAGEDY
It has been documented that some twenty-five American Catholic priests have taken their lives after being accused. Some in the news media have implied that their despair is evidence of guilt. How sad and shallow.
People of justice and conscience have expressed concern that our use of the death penalty in criminal cases may have resulted in the execution of some innocent men. Given the hundreds of innocent men who have been wrongly imprisoned for rape and other crimes, then exonerated by retesting DNA evidence, the concern is justified.
But isn’t it just as likely that some innocent priests were on that list of twenty-five who lost hope? Isn’t it possible that what some of them despaired most was the apparent end of justice and fairness, the sheer impossibility of defending themselves? Believe me on this, accusations of sexual abuse are far more devastating for the innocent than for the guilty. I believe that others who have been falsely accused will corroborate this fact.
Absent clear and convincing evidence – and there has been none – I presume Father Richard Lower’s innocence. It’s what the United States Constitution bids me to do. It’s what the rule of law – both Church and civil – bids me to do, and it’s what the Gospel bids me to do. To presume anything else, absent evidence to the contrary, would belie a heart too jaded to claim to live justly and fairly, to claim to live the Gospel of Mercy.
After the tragic suicide of another priest, Father William Rosensteel, in June, 2007, Catholic columnist Matt C. Abbott published a powerful statement on www.RenewAmerica.com. It was from an unnamed supporter of Father Rosensteel:
“We need to remember how important a person’s good name is. To knowingly
harm a person’s reputation without cause and clear evidence is a serious violation of the
Eighth Commandment. The consequences of such violations are far-reaching and irreversible.
Even a priest who is known to be guilty of the crime of child abuse should not be
required to forfeit his life to satisfy attorneys, insurance companies, the media and plaintiffs.
How much more is this true of a priest whose ‘case’ has not yet been decided?”
(RenewAmerica, August 7, 2007)
As I held the local newspaper in my hand on December 30, 2002, with a headline declaring the scandal of a priest’s suicide, I would have given anything to be on that wooded path that day with Father Lower at what he feared was the end of all things he held dear. I now wish I had the means to write in 2002 what I am writing here. It may have saved this good priest’s life. Even now there is hope – for Father Lower and for us.
First, there’s a lesson to be learned. It’s especially important that priests and lay people reach out to priests burdened with the tyranny of decades-old claims of abuse. In “The Sacred Priesthood,” an essay for the Year of the Priest Father John Zuhlsdorf wrote:
“The sacred priesthood is the common treasure and responsibility of the whole Church.”
Doesn’t that treasure warrant the benefit of the doubt for priests accused? Doesn’t it call us to support them with our words, our prayers, our mercy, and – if needed – our forgiveness?
“Today, the Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives” (CCC 2283) recognizing that people who commit suicide suffer from anguish that can mitigate moral responsibility. I don’t think anyone can look justly at what happened to Father Lower and not see anguish there.
This Year of the Priest is a time to have hope for Father Richard Lower’s soul, and, from our practice of mercy, for ourselves. We owe it to him and other priests who lost all hope to assist them still with our prayers and Masses, with our Gospel mandate to be merciful. We owe it to our spiritual brothers and fathers in the priesthood to resolve to never again let another priest walk alone through the valley of darkness.
For my brother, Father Richard Lower:
“Softly and gently, dearly-ransomed soul,
In my most loving arms I now enfold thee,
And, o’er the penal waters, as they roll,
I poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee.
And carefully I dip thee in the lake,
And thou, without a sob or a resistance,
Dost through the flood thy rapid passage take,
Sinking deep, deeper, into the dim distance.
Angels, to whom the willing task is given,
Shall tend, and nurse, and lull thee, as thou liest;
And Masses on the earth and prayers in heaven,
Shall aid thee at the throne of the most Highest.
Farewell, but not forever! Brother dear,
Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow;
Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,
And I will come and wake thee on the morrow.”
John Henry Cardinal Newman,
Conclusion: “The Dream of Gerontius.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: To read Father MacRae’s regular posts and to familiarize yourself with his case, please visit These Stone Walls.
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The Catholic League just recently released Fr. Gordon MacRae’s latest article:
Due Process for Accused Priests
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Catholic League Releases Statement on Margaret Markey’s Sexual Abuse Bill
Catholic League Releases Statement on Margaret Markey’s Sexual Abuse Bill
June 4, 2009
Paul Vitello has a news story in today’s New York Times reporting on the decision by New York State Assemblywoman Margaret Markey to amend her bill on the sexual abuse of children. Her previous bill only covered private institutions like the Catholic Church, leaving in place protections afforded public institutions.
This led many Catholics to oppose her bill and support the one sponsored by Assemblyman Vito Lopez which treats public and private institutions equally. There is still one major difference between the two bills: Markey’s allows for a one year suspension of the statute of limitations, thus permitting anyone to file a claim regardless of when the abuse occurred.
Catholic League president Bill Donohue outlined a new campaign:
The statute of limitations is an integral provision of justice, and that is why the Lopez bill is still preferable to Markey’s new one.
But if Markey’s bill prevails, the Catholic League will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in a massive public education campaign to alert those who have been sexually abused by a public school employee that they now have one year to sue the schools, even if the abuse took place when JFK was president. We will use every media outlet available.
Our campaign will be limited to those victimized in public schools. Why? Because up until now, in New York and many other states, lawyers and professional victims’ abuse advocates have waged a relentless campaign to exclusively stick it to Catholic institutions, all the while doing positively nothing to help those victimized by public school teachers.
To even the scales of justice, we will now copy-cat their tactics, only the target audience this time will be those molested in the public schools.
Markey is nothing if not dishonest. All along she insisted that her initial bill applied equally to private and public institutions. But if this were true, then there would have been no need to amend it.
Contact Markey at MarkeyM@assembly.state.ny.us
For more information by Francis X. Maier on the public school protections, read Crisis Magazine on Clerical Abuse Scams
The parishioners of the Diocese of Manchester have been scammed of their Mass donations and The Rev Gordon MacRae stripped of his reputation and liberty.
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Catholic League Releases Statement on Fr. Gordon MacRae This Morning
May 29, 2009
Help Fr. MacRae
No priest that we are aware of has been more unfairly tried and convicted than Father Gordon MacRae. Just as those who are guilty of sexual molestation shake the conscience of ordinary Americans, those who are unfairly accused should merit the same response. Sadly, this is not the case, and it is certainly not true in Father MacRae’s case.
For justice to be done, Father MacRae needs to raise additional funds to pay for an investigation that may help enormously. If you agree that he has been treated unfairly, please give what you can to help this man.
For information about his case go to www.GordonMacRae.net See the “Contact” section for where to donate.
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Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud by the Rev. Gordon J. MacRae
(Catalyst 11/2005)
Three years before the latest wave of clergy sex abuse claims rippled out of Boston across the country, Sean Murphy, age 37, and his mother, Sylvia, demanded $850,000 from the Archdiocese of Boston. Sean claimed that three decades earlier, he and his brother were repeatedly molested by their parish priest.
In support of the claim, Mrs. Murphy produced old school records placing her sons in a community where the priest was once assigned. No other corroboration was needed. Shortly thereafter, Byron Worth, age 41, recounted molestation by the same priest and demanded his own six-figure settlement.
The men were following an established practice of “blanket settlements,” a precedent set in the early 1990s when a multitude of molestation claims from the 1960s and 1970s emerged against Father James Porter and a few other priests. In 1993, the Diocese of Fall River settled some 80 such claims in one fell swoop. Other Church institutions followed that lead on the advice of insurers and attorneys.
Before the Murphys’ $850,000 demand was paid, however, Sean, his mother, and Byron Worth were indicted by a Massachusetts grand jury for conspiracy, attempted larceny, and soliciting others to commit larceny. It turned out that Sean and Byron were once inmates together at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Shirley where they concocted their fraudulent plan to score a windfall from their beleaguered Church.
On November 16, 2001, Sean Murphy and Byron Worth pleaded guilty to all charges and were sentenced to less than two years in prison for the scam. The younger Murphy brother was never charged, and Mrs. Murphy died before facing court proceedings.
Local newspapers relegated the Murphy scam to the far back pages while headlines screamed about the emerging multitude of decades-old claims of abuse by priests. When two other inmates at MCI-Shirley accused another priest in 2001, a Boston lawyer wrote that it is no coincidence these men shared the same prison.
“They also shared the same contingency lawyer,” he wrote. “I have some contacts in the prison system, having been an attorney for some time, and it has been made known to me that this is a current and popular scam.”
It is not difficult to understand the roots of such fraud. Prison inmates, like others, read newspapers. Just months before the onslaught of claims against priests, the Archdiocese of Boston landed on the litigation radar screen with the notorious arrest of Mr. Christopher Reardon, a young, married, Catholic layman, model citizen, and youth counselor at a local YMCA who was also employed part-time at a small, remote parish outpost north of Boston.
As Mr. Reardon’s extensive serial child molestation case came to light—with substantial and graphic DNA, videotape, and photographic evidence of assaults that occurred over previous months—the YMCA quickly entered into settlements consistent with the State’s charitable immunity laws.
In a search for deeper pockets, however, a local contingency lawyer pondered for the news media about whether the rural part-time parish worker’s activities were personally known—and covered up—by the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston. It was a ludicrous suggestion, but it was a springboard to announce in the Boston Globe (July 14, 2001) that “the hearsay and speculation” among lawyers and clients, is that “the Catholic Church settled their cases [of suspected abuse by priests] for an average of $500,000 each since the 1990s.”
It was a dangled lure that would soon have many takers, some of whom have been to the Church’s ATM more than once. In January of 2003, at the height of the clergy scandal, a 68-year-old Massachusetts priest had the poor judgment to be drawn into a series of suggestive Internet exchanges with a total stranger, a 32-year-old man named Dominic Martin.
Using a threat of media exposure of the printed exchanges, Mr. Martin demanded that the priest leave an envelope containing $3,000 in a local restaurant lobby. The frightened priest, who never had a prior accusation, compounded his poor judgment by paying the demand. Soon after, another cash demand was made, but the priest finally called the police who set up a sting of their own. On January 24, 2003, Dominic Martin and his wife, Brianna, were arrested at the drop point, and charged with extortion.
The police report revealed that Mr. Martin had changed his name. His birth name was identified as Tod Biltcliffe, a man who, a decade earlier, obtained a lucrative settlement when he accused a New Hampshire priest of molesting him in the 1980s. At the time the priest protested that Mr. Biltcliffe was committing fraud and larceny. The Church settled anyway.
Biltcliffe’s claim was that when he was 15 years old, the priest fondled his genitals while the two were in a hot tub at a local YMCA. Curiously, the investigation file contained a transcript of a 1988 “Geraldo Rivera” show entitled “The Church’s Sexual Watergate.” One of the cases profiled was that of a young man who claimed that a priest fondled his genitals while the two were in a hot tub at a local YMCA.
The 1988 “Geraldo” transcript was a sensationalized account of clergy sex abuse cases from the 1970s and 1980s. The transcript is notable because it contains many of the same claims of exposing secret Church documents, archives, and episcopal cover-ups in 1988 that lawyers and reporters claim to have exposed in 2003.
Writer Jason Berry, and contingency lawyers Jeffrey Anderson and Roland Lewis all appeared live on “Geraldo” on November 14, 1988 to announce the existence of secret Church archives, cover-ups by bishops, and out-of-court settlements of Catholic clergy sex abuse claims across the country.
Jason Berry, who excoriates the Church and priesthood at every opportunity, actually defended, in 1988, the existence of so-called “secret” Church archives: “Canon law says that you have to have a secret archive in every diocese….That’s funny because I’ve been attacking the Church for three years on this…I want to express my own irony of [now] being in a position of defending the Church.”
I have been in prison for eleven years. As a priest, I cringed while the latest wave of abuse claims unfolded in the press in the last few years. Inmates often feel like victims, but some saw the proliferation of abuse claims as a lucrative scam and wondered why they were letting such an opportunity pass.
I have been repeatedly asked whether I would give the name of a priest who might have been present in someone’s childhood neighborhood, or if I thought the Church would quietly settle if a claim was made. When asked if the claim would be true, the answer is always the same: “Of course not!” One inmate reported that he was visited by his lawyer who asked if he is Catholic. The lawyer is alleged to have said: “If you want to accuse a priest of something, I can have $50-grand in your account by the end of the year.”
Another inmate told of his narcotics arrest by a detective who was apparently fielding cases for contingency lawyers. The young man reported that he was asked whether he wanted to accuse a priest who had been accused by others. The young man insisted there was nothing he could accuse the priest of, but the detective reportedly suggested: “That’s sort of beside the point, isn’t it? We’re talking a lot of money here.”
Yet another inmate claims that he indeed was molested by a priest and is awaiting settlement from a distant diocese. The man says little about the abuse beyond a vague and cursory suggestion that he somehow repressed it. He drones on incessantly, however, about plans for his expected windfall, about investment opportunities, and about how non-invasive the settlement process has been.
Another, rather insightful inmate remarked: “Let me get this straight. If I say that some priest touched me funny 20 years ago, I’ll be paid for it, I’ll be a victim, and my life will be HIS fault instead of mine! Do you have any idea how tempting this is?”
In a 2004 article in the Boston Phoenix, “Fleecing the Shepherds,” legal expert and author Harvey Silverglate cautioned against capitulating to significant numbers of questionable claims brought after the Church entered into huge blanket settlements. In some cases, such claims were deemed “credible”—the standard established for permanent removal of accused priests—with no other basis than their having been settled.
As accusations swept over the U.S. Church, few in the media dared write anything contrary to the tidal wave gaining indiscriminate momentum against the Church. A notable exception was the left-leaning Catholic magazine Commonweal, which editorialized: “Admittedly, perspective is hard to come by in the midst of a media barrage that is reminiscent of the day care sex abuse stories, now largely disproved, of the early nineties…All analogies limp, but it is hard not to be reminded of the din of accusation and conspiracy-mongering that characterized the anti-Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s.”
With media coverage of the unprecedented millions invested in blanket settlements, the trolling for claims and litigation continues unabated. Last year, a Boston area high school history teacher and coach of twenty years, a husband and father with no prior record or accusation, was caught up in an Internet sting by a detective posing on-line as a teenage boy cruising Internet chat rooms for sexual encounters.
The practice has netted the detective some 400 arrests, including—by his own estimation—1 priest, 6 police officers, and 18 public school teachers. The ex-teacher, now prison inmate, related that as the handcuffs were set upon him, before he was even led out of the YMCA to which he had been lured and arrested, the detective asked some curious questions: “Are you a Catholic?” “Yes.” “Were you ever an altar boy?” Another “yes.” “Were you ever molested by a priest?”
Father Gordon MacRae is in prison for claims alleged to have occurred in 1983, and for which he maintains innocence. His case was extensively analyzed in a two-part series in The Wall Street Journal (April 27/28,2005) by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Dorothy Rabinowitz.
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Fr. Daniel Coughlin: Catholic League Says Roll Call Smears Innocent Priest
Fr. Daniel Coughlin: Catholic League Says Roll Call Smears Innocent Priest
“Morton Kondracke, the executive editor of Roll Call, needs to extend an apology not only to Father Coughlin, but to the Catholic community as well for exploiting the issue of priestly sexual abuse.”
Follow the Discussion
Fr. John Zuhlsdorf’s Post and Commentary
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Articles
Selected Blog Posts by Fr. Arthur Joseph
I believe the time has come to challenge Bishops, Priests, Laity, to look at the repercussions of the Dallas Charter and the abusive way in which priests are denied due process, the poisoned atmosphere where allegation becomes fact, where indeed, though not as visible as the one in Cuba, we have within the Church our own Gitmo. Throughout the world those priests condemned to life in this Catholic Gitmo numbers in the thousands. ~ Fr. Arthur Joseph
Living in the Catholic Gitmo: 1
Living in the Catholic Gitmo: 2 – A Three Day Reflection
Living in the Catholic Gitmo: 3 – A Blessed for those denied due process
Living in the Catholic Gitmo: 4 – A Post for Suffering Priests
Living in the Catholic Gitmo: 5 – Towards the Thin Place
Living in the Catholic Gitmo: 6 – Crawling Towards the Thin Place
Out of the Swamp of Darkness – scroll down
Administrative Leave Issues
The Civil & Canonical Rights of Roman Catholic Priests in Boston by Carol McKinley
Fr. Christopher Buckner Support Blog
Catholic League July/August 2009: Due Process for Accused Priests by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae
The Father Gordon MacRae Case Site
Priest sues bishop, fellow priests over harm to reputation by Rachanee Srisavasdi
Priest in Exile: Fr. Joe Baca & the Fresno Diocese
Now where do I go to get my reputation back? by Diogenes of Catholic Culture
Diocese says book by suspended Baraboo priest should be destroyed by Capital Staff Writers
On the Removal and Transfer of a Parish Priest by Auxiliary Bishop Porteous of Sydney
Fr. Eduard Perrone on Opus Bono Sacerdotii
“Nightline” Guilty of Injustice and Hypocrisy by The Catholic League
Helping Accused Priests is His Calling by Sue Ellin Browder
Ousted Priest Wages Battle to Clear Name, Return to Ministry by Gail Besse
Collared-Falsely: Not Every Priest is Rightly Accused by Rod Dreher
Accused Priests Given Unique Right of Appeal by Simon Caldwell
Fighting Back, Accused Priests Charge Slander by Sam Dillon
What to Do with the Priests in Chicago by Amy Welborn
Persecuted Priests: A Growing Problem in US by Mary Ann Kreitzer
Some Canon Lawyers Say Due Process Limited for Accused Priests by A. Bono
The Protection of the Canonical Rights of Priests by Msgr. Michael Higgins
Due Process for Priests by Walter R. Hampton, Jr.
Bishops Must Give Priests Due Process Says President of Priests” Council by Michael Kelly
Due Process for Accused Priests by Msgr. Harry J. Byrne, JCD
U.S. Cardinal Says Priests Are Denied Due Process by The New York Times
Priests Want Due Process by Gary Stern
Due Process for Priests? by Brian D. Sabin
Abuse Survivors Finding Peace
A Victim’’s Defense of Priests by Terry Donovan Urekew
True Healing from Abuse Starts in the Heart by John Everett
Loneliness
Identifying, Resolving Loneliness in Priestly Life by Richard P. Fitzgibbons
Reform of the Renewal
Liturgical and Sexual Abuses by G.C. Dilsaver, PsyD, MTS
Priests and the Importance of Fatherhood by Paul Vitz & Daniel Vitz
The Sacred Priesthood by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf
The Gay Priest Problem by Fr. Paul Shaughnessy
Priestly Identity: Crisis and Renewal Part 1, Interview with Fr. David Toups
Priestly Identity: Crisis and Renewal Part 2, Interview with Fr. David Toups
The Real Reason for the Vocation Crisis Part 1 by Fr. Michael P. Orsi
The Real Reason for the Vocation Crisis Part 2 by Fr. Michael P. Orsi (See Pt. 4)
A Crisis of Saints by Fr. Roger Landry
The Priest: Icon of Christ, Enabler of Sanctity by George Weigel
